This
would be Okay if that one hacker committed 100,000 crimes. No data
on that in this story.
Here’s
a depressing statistic: one
computer hacker a month is convicted of cyber crime under the
Computer Misuse Act out of 100,000 incidents a year.
Perhaps
“remedial grammar school” (what we used to call an education
degree) is not the best training for running a school.
Okay,
this is really bad, on multiple levels. Brendan Foley and
Jayne Miller report:
Tewksbury Public Schools face angry parental
backlash following the release of private student information online
last week. A document included in a 222-page School Committee packet
remained online for the better part of a week, before being taken
down Monday.
Awareness of the data, which details private information for the out
of district placements of 83 students and rates their parents
according to their “cooperativeness” with the district, raised
outrage on social media over the weekend.
[…]
The seven-page memo from Rick Pelletier, Director of Student
Services, to the Superintendent was included in the School Committee
packet as part of its budget justification package last week. The
memo includes a spreadsheet that listed all the students with out of
district placements – and also included a ranking on ‘parental
cooperativeness.’ The amount of data included could indicate a
violation of state and federal law.
The list, which replaces student names with numbers, remains in
alphabetical order. Information included the student’s current
grade, the out-of-district school, the last school attended, the year
the student began attending the new school, information on whether or
not the decision was made by the IEP team, a legal settlement
(typically kept strictly confidential), or if the student moved in
from another town, and miscellaneous detail such as the involvement
of the Department of Children and Families, passage of MCAS
assessments, and more.
The office of Student Services also published its rating of parents
according to their ‘cooperativeness with the district.’ Parents
rated a ‘1’ are cooperative, ‘2’ somewhat cooperative, and
those rated ‘3’ are ‘not cooperative.’
The Town Crier could easily identify seven families included in the
list, and was contacted by others that could identify more families
based on the material in the sheet.
Read
more on The
Town Crier to read responses from the state, the U.S. Education
Department, parents, and a special education attorney. It
seems like the district is not acknowledging any FERPA breach or
breach under state law.
Un-effing-believable.
This
is very important! Following this logic, any system that requires
you to “Opt Out” fails the “user preference” test. Perhaps
we should create an “Opt Out” website as a central point for
users to “express their preference” and sell vendors the right to
display a “badge” if they agree to honor the user's choice.
Microsoft
Will Disable ‘Do Not Track’ Default Setting In Future IE Browser
Releases
Microsoft
is giving Internet
Explorer and Project
Spartan browser users a heads up that in future releases, the Do
Not Track feature will no longer be enabled by default. On the
surface (no pun intended), Microsoft's reasoning for the change is
that enabling the privacy feature by default only encourages websites
to ignore the setting and use tracking cookies anyway.
It's
not such an odd leap of logic, and it's one that the World Wide Web
Consortium (WC3) agrees with. As WC3 explains, sending a signal to
disable tracking "MUST reflect the user's preference, not the
choice of some vendor, institution, site, or network-imposed
mechanism outside the user's control. " So when
no user choice exists -- as would be the case by enabling
DNT by default -- websites
can assume that no tracking preference is being expressed.
(Related)
Implications for the Internet of Things! Has anyone asked if they
are secure? Can I turn off your gas and electric with my smartphone?
Mark
Harrington reports:
… By 2019, PSEG plans to install nearly 180,000 smart meters in
homes and businesses across Long Island, about 15 percent of its 1.1
million customers.
The moves have caught some customers off guard, touching off concerns
about privacy, health and billing issues.
“There’s no proof they are not dangerous,” said Amityville
resident Pete Duryea, who is seeking to have 12 smart meters already
installed on his condo-complex removed.
Long Island utilities say the concerns are unfounded, noting that
many meters use the same
radio frequency as cordless telephones and cellphones.
Read
more on Newsday
(subscription required).
This
could be big! I'm on their waiting list to see if I can add it to my
Excel class or my Statistics class or one of the Data Analytics
classes, etc.
New
Office tool brings analytics for everyone
Analytics
is an amazing tool, done right it is basically the
digital equivalent of a crystal ball, [Not
if you do it correctly! Bob] but there are several
problems with it. First, you will typically need a data scientist to
formulate the questions and translate the answers; second, the number
of executives who are data scientists is small and the two
professions don’t exactly speak the same language; and three, the
tools are wickedly expensive. The end result is that these tools are
underutilized, ignored, not implemented or misused – none of which
gives the bean counters a warm and fuzzy feeling about investing in
them.
Well
one day after April Fool’s day BeyondCore
released an analytics tool that is integrated with Microsoft Office
and can be used by anyone
who knows how to use Office. This is an analytics tool
for every employee and it potentially could be a game-changer, having
as big an impact as Word or Excel did in their day.
…
Now, while this will undoubtedly cut into the fun of finance folks
and auditors worldwide (because
we get enjoyment privately making fun of clueless executives)
the end result should be better decisions and far less embarrassment.
Plus when you see how the answers relate to the questions you
actually get smarter and we could all benefit from smarter
executives.
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